How to replace brackets in strings

Question

I have a list of strings that contains tokens.
Token is:

{ARG:token_name}.

I also have hash map of tokens, where key is the token and value is the value I want to substitute the token with.

When I use "replaceAll" method I get error:

java.util.regex.PatternSyntaxException: Illegal repetition

My code is something like this:

myStr.replaceAll(valueFromHashMap , "X"); 

and valueFromHashMap contains { and }.

I get this hashmap as a parameter.

Answer 1

String.replaceAll() works on regexps. {n,m} is usually repetition in regexps.

Try to use \\{ and \\} if you want to match literal brackets.

So replacing all opening brackets by X works that way:

myString.replaceAll("\\{", "X");

See here to read about regular expressions (regexps) and why { and } are special characters that have to be escaped when using regexps.